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Monthly Archives: January 2015

It’s time for the monthly nod to journalism here at Wickersham’s Conscience, where WC engages in a sketchy kind of diligence and follows up on earlier posts. Don’t confuse it with accountability; the talisman is still WC’s magpie sensibility. Governor Bill Walker acceded to at least one of WC’s requests, and appointed a special investigator…

The late Chicago 47th Ward Alderman John Hoellen particularly disliked Pablo Picasso’s sculpture at then-Civic Center Plaza in downtown Chicago. In a resolution introduced at a Chicago City Council meeting July 7, 1967, Hoellen called for the statue to be “deported,” preferably to Paris, France, and called the sculpture (according to a Tribune article): … a heroic monument to some…

Out here in the hinterlands of suburban Fairbanks, at the World Headquarters of Wickersham’s Conscience, we’ve received complaints about the low JPEG quality of photos, brevity of some postings and failure to include video on Wickersham’s Conscience. It’s easily explained. While WC lives in a very nice neighborhood, the area isn’t served by GCI cable. WC isn’t served…

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R, Alaska) had an opinion piece in the News-Miner on Sunday, defending her high profile support of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The puff piece is so wrong, in so many ways that it would take a week of blog posts to address them all. WC will address only a few of the senior senator’s…

One of President Obama’s proposals in his 2015 State of the Union speech was that Congress raise the capital gains tax to increase revenue, decrease income inequality and make the richest 0.1% pay a fairer portion of their income to taxes. After the speech, Republicans and Fox News flew into the expected paroxysm of rage…

WC watched Ernie Banks play his last game. September 25, 1971, the Cubs hopelessly mired in the bottom half of the National League East, the 40-year old Banks was playing with the bad knees that had forced him from shortstop to first base to sometime substitute, but there was still utter, child-like joy in every…

WC’s regular readers will recall that a BUCIP, in WC’s world, is a Big, Ugly, Complicated and Intractable Problem. In Alaska, BUCIPs include the state’s oil-dependent economy, subsistence rights and tribal sovereignty. There are national BUCIPs, too. One of worst is the problem of big money and politics. It’s hardly a new issue, but it…